8 The
United States is at a turning point in its history. Some intellectuals
and journalists have compared the destruction of Saddam Hussein
with the fall of the Berlin Wall or even the collapse of the Soviet
Union. Otherslooking to the origins of the Cold War rather
than its endhave compared the momentous political and economic
changes now underway with the period between 1946 and 1948, when
the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union broke down.

But current changes seem deeper,
more far-reaching, and at the same time less conclusive than either
of these analogies suggests. American power today dominates the
world in quite a different way than it did even at the end of
the Second World War, when the United States and its European
allies faced a powerful and implacable enemy across an increasingly
polarized Europe and elsewhere around the globe. At the same time,
the American Leviathan is only at the beginning of its crusadethe
word seems well chosento democratize the world and ensure
its harmony with American interests.

A more apt (and troubling) comparison
is with the 1920s, when an earlier liberal order collapsed and
was replaced by imperial and mega-state regimes.

* * *

Traditional conservatives have
persistently criticized modern liberalism for its alleged softness.
After the First World War right-wing German and Italian critics
abused the governments of Weimar Germany and pre-Mussolini Italy
for their commitment to social welfare, which their critics linked
to an unwillingness to use force in international relations. To
use Robert Kagans expression, the Weimar Republic could
only do the dishes, not prepare the feast.

German and Italian critics of liberalismwriters
such as Ernst Jünger and Giovanni Gentilelonged for
the military spirit that allegedly typified the front-fighter
generation that had lived through the horrors of trench warfare
during World War I. The experience of war, they said, could redeem
the anti-national Weimar Republic and the spineless decadence
of Italian liberalism by reintroducing them to the necessity of
using forcewhich would mean a much more ready resort to
military power and a reorientation of government to promote its
use. Both men and nations could thereby reestablish their virility.

Extreme right-wing theoreticiansfor
example, German jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmittbelieved
that the European states in general had to choose between defending
the interests of their national communitiesat the end of
the day by forceand sustaining a debilitating commitment
to popular welfare, which more and more absorbed the energies
of a weak-kneed liberalism that precariously clung to power in
many European states. Schmitt believed that the state existed
exclusively to oppose the enemies of the national community and
ensure domestic order. Politics, he famously said, is founded
on the friend-enemy polarity. Liberals had embarked on a fruitless
crusade to escape inevitable political conflict within their societies
by expanding the welfare function of the modern state to appease
the demands of the masses, and thereby weakening its executive
function.

The proximate causes of this revulsion
against liberalism in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere are not far
to seek. And the underlying anti-liberal logic was more cultural
than political-economic. After defeat in World War I neither Germany
nor Italy was able to advance its interests effectively in Europe.
The Italians were widely regarded as pathetic soldiers. The
Italians, Bismarck said, have such large appetites
and such poor teeth. Giovanni Gentile, subsequently a Fascist
minister for Mussolini, lamented the dolce far niente (sweet
do nothing) that he found characterized the Italians as
a nation. As for the Germans, they had of course lost the war,
but they were encouraged to believe that their armies and fighting
men had not been defeated on the battlefield but had been betrayed
by an unpatriotic cabal of Jews, Francophiles, liberals, and socialists.

So for these men and like-minded
others, there was a necessary connection between reviving militarism
and imperialism and curtailing the states commitment to
popular welfare. Only a new political elitebattle-hardened,
ruthless, and devoted to authoritarian governmentcould achieve
the reforms needed to restore these states to the ranks of the
European powerful. The new governments would not be parliamentary:
talk shops never get anything done. In Italy the Fascist elite
developed an imperial ideology focusing on Rome; in Germany, too,
there was an imperial elementthe Thousand Year Empirealthough
we correctly understand the racism of the National Socialists
to have been their most memorable contribution to the horrors
of the 20th century.

* * *

Mutatis mutandis,
we find a similar cultural bond between the Bush administrations
imperial foreign policy and its tax cuts, which not only benefit
Americas richest people and institutions but are deliberately
aimed at starving the welfare state. The United States has achieved
its overwhelming military power at the same time and in close
connection with a revolt against liberalism, which is arguably
as deep as the one that reached its climax with the establishment
of the totalitarian regimes of the 1920s and 1930s. Local crises
are emerging at the state level all across the United States.
Educational institutions are being starved; benefits to the poor
are being cut; the proportion of Americans living in poverty is
up, as is inequality; crises in Medicare and Social Security loom.
And these results are a product of deliberate policy, promoted
through a program of deep tax cuts which promise to erode the
financial capacity of the state to undertake any but the most
minimal welfare functions.

There are still other parallels
with the past. The earlier anti-liberal revolt was marked by an
attack on cultural decadence and a demand for a return to religion
and order. Culture, according to conservative critics, was becoming
trash, and the mess had to be cleaned up, by resolute means. In
Italy and Germany, and in a different way in the Soviet Union,
far more authoritarian or totalitarian government
came to prevail as state power swelled. In other nations as well,
constitutional guarantees were abolished or weakened: authoritarian
and traditionalist governments came to power in Spain, Portugal,
Poland, Hungary, and Austria, and a quasi-Fascist government formed
in Rumania. Liberals were seen as weak-kneed wimps, unwilling
to use force internationally and preoccupied with social welfare
internally; local patriotisms prevailed everywhere. Eventually,
except on the Iberian peninsula, the totalitarian nations
took over the indecisive authoritarian disciples they had spawned.

Intellectual isolation was also
important. In Germany and Italy, competing intellectual points
of view were crowded out, just as had occurred earlierand
even more decisivelyin the Soviet Union. Foreign opinion
and foreign nations were demonized for being run by the wrong
classes, religions, races, or politicians.

Of course, there are differences
between the past and present anti-liberal revolts. In the Soviet
Union private business was demonized and expropriated; in Germany
and Italy it was at least thoroughly dominated by the political
elite. By contrast, in the current revolt, embodied by the United
States, business is an intimate partner of government, at times
seeming almost indistinguishable from it. When Iraq is rebuilt,
it appears that most of the contracts will go to such companies
as Bechtel and Halliburton, with major ties to Vice President
Cheney and other administration figures. The military-industrial
complex that Eisenhower warned us against almost half a century
ago is attaining its maturity.

It has been too little
noticed what an about-face the Bush administration has made since
9/11. From an indecisive tendency toward isolation and proposals
of Rube Goldbergstyle schemes for missile defense, the imperial
drive for global dominance has within some few months become the
all-but-officially proclaimed doctrine of the administration,
though it has been more than a decade in the planning. These apparent
contrasts between isolation and empire have one important thing
in common: Its all or nothing, but either way we make our
own rules.

Historically, people often do not
notice the most important social changes because they are part
of the everyday reality that is usually not viewed as being historically
significant. Events of great moment are much easier to determine
retrospectively. But we should make no mistake: nothing comparable
to current cultural and political developments has happened since
the world of the 20th century took shape in the period following
World War I, the end of the long 19th century. <

Abbott Gleason is professor of history at Brown University
and author of Totalitarianism (Oxford University Press,
1995).